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How MaestroDev Delivers Enterprise-Grade DevOps Orchestration Tools With Flowdock

November 15th, 2012

Mikael Roos

Brett Porter

This is a guest blog post written by Brett Porter, CTO of MaestroDev, who develop DevOps orchestration tools. In this article, Brett lays out how they’ve used Flowdock as a main communication tool with distributed teams and integrated Flowdock directly into their own products.

MaestroDev is a proud Flowdock customer. Since we began using it early in the year, we have greatly improved the internal visibility of development progress, and streamlined our methods of communication – reducing the number of redundant calls and emails.

The MaestroDev product development team is globally distributed, covering 4 different timezones. Our Flowdock flow is active 24 hours a day with development information and tagged updates for each other. Whether they work face to face, or remotely, Flowdock puts all of our team members on an equal footing, catching up on important discussions as they start their day, and leaving notes about progress for team members whom they may not otherwise be able to meet with immediately.

About Maestro

We have developed Maestro, our enterprise-grade DevOps Orchestration engine, to help enable all members of a software delivery team to be more efficient and collaborative. Maestro introduces Compositions, a reusable definition of a sequence of tools, processes and infrastructure that can be automated and interacted with. Compositions encapsulate best practices and encourage consistency across projects, reducing ramp up time and silos of expertise about infrastructure. Maestro is built to take advantage of modern public and private cloud technology to dynamically scale build, test and deployment infrastructure. This reduces friction between development, QA and operations team members and reduces the wait time for necessary infrastructure. Finally, Compositions and their execution output provide a single source of truth and history about a variety of systems, where team members can keep up to date, participate in decision points, and gather feedback from integrated tools to determine future improvements.

Integrating Flowdock and Maestro for Delivery Visibility

As you can see, Flowdock complements Maestro as a dedicated information flow for communication, notifications and actions. For this reason, we have developed Flowdock integration for Maestro and incorporated it into our delivery workflows.

You can read more about the Maestro Flowdock integration in the Maestro Documentation Guides, and at the plugin’s GitHub project page.

Maestro has integration for a number of different tools available, and at MaestroDev some that we use are:

  • JIRA: issue tracking and sprint planning
  • GitHub: source control
  • Jenkins: continuous integration and automated builds
  • Apache Archiva: build artifact management
  • Vagrant and VirtualBox: virtual machine for testing and delivery
  • Puppet: infrastructure configuration management

With these tools orchestrated by Maestro and information streaming to Flowdock, we’re able to track a change from a JIRA ticket and a commit, through its deployment on a preview instance, automated functional tests and a complete candidate virtual machine image for distribution.

Our primary automated workflow looks like this:

  • A commit at GitHub triggers a notification to Flowdock, and triggers a Composition to start the rest of the process
  • Maestro ensures a suitable Jenkins job is executed to build the project and publish to the artifact repository.
  • Flowdock is notified in the event of success (showing the published RPM version and build number) or failure (showing the full output and error that occurred)
  • If it was successful, Maestro concurrently starts Compositions to update the preview instance, and run functional tests
  • For the preview instance, we update the RPM version in the Puppet manifest, and trigger a Puppet agent run on the host. Puppet reports back to Flowdock when it is complete, and we know the preview instance is updated with the change
  • For functional tests, a virtual machine is started with Vagrant, provisioned with Puppet, and then tests are run via Jenkins using Cucumber and Capybara. If any fail, a notification is sent to the main Flow.
  • If the functional tests are successful, then a new virtual machine is produced and a notification sent to the main Flow.

Of course, we have many other such Compositions for sequences including releases, building and deploying Puppet modules, publishing promoted VMs to Amazon S3, and so on – all similarly integrated with Flowdock.

If you’re interested in trying Maestro out for yourself, contact us and we’ll set you up with an evaluation system and several similar pre-configured examples.

Flowdock has become the first thing I check in the morning, and one of the most useful tools I turn to throughout the day to find out what is happening, discuss a solution with a colleague, or just share a link to something fun and interesting. Our thanks go to the Flowdock team for a great product!

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Flowdock As Onboarding Tool

August 23rd, 2012

Mikael Roos

Krista Kauppinen

This is a guest blog post written by Krista Kauppinen who recently started as Head of Online Marketing at Holvi, a customer of ours. She explains how Flowdock has helped her get started at her new job.

I recently started as the second nontechnical employee at Holvi, an online banking service startup that was founded in 2011. Our company is growing, but we still have everyone on the same Flowdock flow. This has been an unexpected blessing for me.

I have a business degree and I work on marketing and customer acquisition. I don’t always understand the discussions our developers have on the flow, but I’m able to see what they’re talking about and it’s in writing (so I can google unfamiliar terms!). Being able to easily get a technical perspective on customer questions and feedback by forwarding emails to Flowdock means I’ve been able to do customer support from almost day 1.

Flowdock has also been great for better understanding the pace of technical development and the relative difficulty of implementing new features and bug fixes. The team inbox that brings in data from Twitter, Zendesk and reports from our product, gives a good overall view of where we are in terms of progress.

Our team uses tagging actively, so I’ve been able to search tags like #todo, #blog or #marketing to see what’s previously been discussed on different topics. Not having to pop into the other room to ask questions and interrupt people’s workflow or send an email to whoever I suspect might know about issue X has made joining the team a lot smoother.

An added bonus of using Flowdock is seeing when my co-workers are online, as startup founders and developers often work odd hours. This has been useful for understanding their work patterns better. We have our security advisor as part of the flow, giving his point of view on what we discuss. Security is a very important aspect of building a banking product, and without Flowdock, getting information about this would be a lot more time consuming.

We also use Flowdock to share various types of benchmarking data, relevant articles, ideas we have, customer development insights and even jokes. This has helped me get to the know the company and my coworkers faster than at many previous jobs and with less effort from the others to get my caught up.

Thank you Flowdock!

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Flowdock Makes Xobni More Productive

May 31st, 2012

Mikael Roos

Xobni, one of the earlier Y Combinator funded startups (YC 06), is a Flowdock customer. They make your inbox and address book smarter by making it easy to search and discover all your contacts – even those who aren’t in your address book. Xobni’s director of marketing, Britton Montalvo paints a picture:

What if you had a magic address book that automatically identified the name and contact information for everyone you had ever communicated with? Xobni brings you that magic with our mobile and desktop solutions that automatically create rich profiles for all your contacts, including photos, complete contact info, communication history and updates from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Xobni’s Smartr Contacts is available for iPhone (video & download) and Android (video & download). Both apps have been named “The Best Address Book Apps” by Lifehacker. You can even get it on BlackBerry. Smartr Inbox is available for Gmail and they have Xobni for Outlook.

Flowdock at Xobni

So, how does Flowdock fit into this? Xobni has been using Flowdock now for a few months. Having previously used an array of messaging clients including Skype, GTalk, Yahoo! Messenger etc, the Xobni team has seen a massive shift in communications moving to Flowdock:

Now 80% of our communications reside in Flowdock. Flowdock has also increased the Xobni Server Engineering team’s productivity tremendously with its deep integrations.

The Xobni team uses JIRA for defect tracking, Opsview for monitoring, Git for version control and also QuickBuild and Capistrano as deployment tools.

Flowdock manages to keep everyone on the same page, and working efficiently:

We are distributed across San Francisco, Montreal, Iowa and India and using Flowdock has enabled us to stay better connected with one another and work much more efficiently. At any time, anyone in the team can instantly get up to speed on what is happening in our network, so they can jump in to help resolve any issue or identify potential areas for optimization. With Flowdock, we are able to easily process and manage more than 5 billion messages for our users per month.

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Style Me Pretty with Flowdock

September 7th, 2011

Anni Rautio

Style Me Pretty is a style savvy wedding blog, that loves Flowdock. We talked with the technical lead of the team, Tait Larson, to get a behind-the-scenes look at how Flowdock helps Style Me Pretty operate smoothly.

Launched in 2007, Style Me Pretty is on a mission to bring chic and sophisticated wedding to the masses.

Bringing in over 500.000 visitors and 13 million page views each month, Style Me Pretty has grown leaps and bounds from its beginnings. The team has expanded from Abby and Tait to about 15 people scattered all over the United States.

Tracking Media inside Flowdock

Keeping the blog up and running and staying on top of all social networks requires a fleet of technical and non-technical staff. They are located all over the United States, yet they work seamlessly together, and they work fast.

How? With Flowdock.

“Flowdock is just quicker, cleaner and better than other tools around!”, Tait says.

On any given day, Style Me Pretty needs to follow up on the hottest trends, see what’s new, and keep Style Me Pretty active on all social networks, like Twitter. To ensure their fingers are constantly on the pulse of what’s new & pretty, Style Me Pretty tracks social media and website activity through Flowdock’s real time notifications – keeping both internal and external communication timely.

All team on the same page

The entire Style Me Pretty team uses Flowdock on a daily basis – keeping people in constant commutation and making all tasks that much more efficient. Editors may ask the tech team for advice, and the tech team can keep everyone updated on any issues that might arise.

Flowdock is used as a 101 tech support channel inside the team – everyone always knows who’s online, and status updates tell who’s working on what.

Another key function is the social aspect. “The team is spread across many states, and by chatting in Flowdock, the team members connect and gather around a “virtual water cooler”", adds Tait.

“Since we started with Flowdock, the team has more than doubled in size. Flowdock has helped us avoid communication hiccups as we grow!”

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Flowdocking the Uxebu Way

September 2nd, 2011

Anni Rautio

Wolfram KriesingMeet Wolfram Kriesing, Co-Founder of uxebu, a quickly growing JavaScript company.

In their own words, uxebu is not just another web and mobile app developer. Rather, they go head first to tackle mobile challenges of all kinds, from commercial ventures to open source projects.

Uxebu was kicked off in 2008 between 3 guys. Originally from Munich, Germany, the uxebu team has grown into a collection of developers spread across Munich, Amsterdam and Ohio.

To stay on top of their game regardless of timezones, closely-knit teamwork is a must for this agile startup. When it comes to collaboration, uxebu trusts Flowdock’s expertise.

Less email, more conversation

The uxebu team was never a big fan of email. Before entering the world of Flowdock, uxebu relied on Skype and Skype chat. While Flowdock hasn’t eliminated the need for Skype calls, especially with external clients, what has changed is the way the team works together.

In Flowdock, uxebu has created separate flows, or project rooms, for each project they are working on.

“We don’t have all team members working actively on all projects, but still everyone has free access to each project’s information. If I need to follow up on a project in which I don’t have an active role, I can still access the project flow anytime I want to find the update I need”, Wolfram says.

The team discusses the everyday issues and customer updates in a general flow, but project-based flows are all about hard work. Discussion revolves around work-related details, the real techie stuff.

Highlighting the important info

What makes uxebu’s work more efficient, is how they use #tags and @mentions. Working across timezones can create bottlenecks in development and communication, but Flowdock keeps you notified even when you’re asleep.

Wolfram gets highlighted in Flowdock

“When I open Flowdock in the morning, the comments that are important to me get highlighted. Skype just can’t do this!”, says Wolfram. “Skype’s notification was too noisy for me. In Flowdock, I have customized what types of notifications ping me.”

Connecting team members around the clock smooths out the software development process. All work related discussions take place on Flowdock, making it simple for everyone to stay on top of their game.

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